Nengajou
by The Hart and Hound
Summary: Hinata has always sent her New Year’s cards to everyone, even to the people who will never write her back.


Title: Nengajou

Author: tsubaki-hana

Series: Naruto

Rating: K

Disclaimer: Naruto belongs to Kishimoto Masashi.

Summary: Hinata has always sent her New Year's cards to everyone, even to the people who will never write her back.

- - - - -

- - - - -

Hinata's first smudged letter to her father for the holidays is something hardly worthy of praise, filled with more ink than actual writing, crinkled red paper sticking to her babyish fingers. It has been folded with anticipation, rewritten with white, black, and blue ink, and torn from where she worried the edge one too many times. She is four years old, and her mother has just shown her how to write her name. She wants to show her father as soon as she can (_because no one else matters near as much, and she can't seem to get her mother to understand that_).

"You shouldn't bother your father, not until you've cleaned up your kanji just a little bit."

Her mother, a willowy woman (_oh, but never -that- kind of willow woman_), holds Hinata in arms that are much too weak to hold any child anymore. She has been sick for most of the autumn, in and out of the Konoha hospital. Her father sometimes tells her that it is because her mother (never his wife) is pregnant, and that she was two people in one body. The autumn was not kind on her frail mother's health. (_Hinata flinches at the word autumn, thinking at once of "fall."_)

Hinata, in her youth, does not know that her squirming to get to her father's office will leave stark yellow and purple bruises on those thin arms. She also does not know that her mother will not protest, because no matter that colored flesh may hurt, it is something that the lady of the Hyuuga house will try to keep. There is so little that she may call her own and not her husband's these days.

Hinata knows the letters to her name, and in hindsight, she wonders why she didn't just show her mother, a person that actually wanted to see. However, it might have been more hurtful to let her see.

The letter read: _Hinata loves otou-san._

All the same, she piles her neatly stacked New Year's cards, penning the name "Hyuuga Yanagi"with delicate purple brushstrokes. She will not mail it, but instead keeps it in a drawer of her dresser, buried beneath the kimono boxes until they are yellow with age and sawdust. She will keep them there until she is not ashamed, until she can feel justified in opening then again.

- - - - -

Once Hiashi knows that Hinata can write her own New Year's cards, she does it again and again until she no longer wants to show them anymore. As the heiress, Hinata learns quickly that she must write every political figure in Konoha, even if her kanji is less than perfect, because she must have good relations before she even knows what a relationship is.

At six, Hinata is not so clumsy as to tear the edges (_even if she does, she now has glue_), and she does not write over her writing with white and blue ink (_especially since she is so particularly good at apologizing for misspelling her great-aunt's name, something long and tedious_.) There are only a couple of other children that are her age who do this, and she stumbles upon one quite accidentally, standing on tiptoes that don't bring her quite high enough to see over the post office's counter. She struggles to ring the office bell, but only feels the edges of paper and books that she knows she shouldn't touch.

"Can you not reach the bell?"

Hinata turns her head, smoothing her green kimono with fisted hands and hair with dirty nails (They catch on her barrettes, pulling little white flower pins that her governess has sewn for her.) Standing in his shinobi uniform is the Uchiha clan's heir, impassive and unpassable. He frowns a little, the lines beneath his eyes making him seem much older than he really is. To her surprise, he too has a handful of letters that he would rather be without, addressed to nobles and councilmen with a bright red fan seal.

He follows her white gaze to his hand and smiles wryly, but rather than commenting, he beckons her closer and lifts her with one arm to ring the office bell. As a six-year-old, Hinata considers herself half in love with him, thinking the world of one boost up at the post office which was more than she could say for most. He was older than she, and that was half the magic of it.

Next year, after the dissolution of the Uchiha clan by the very same boy that lifted her up to the counter, Hinata wrote him a New Year's card anyway. She ss unfailingly proper, and even if she does not have dealings with the Uchiha clan anymore (_or so her father tells her_), she believes that he will get the message if not the paper.

_Thank you for lifting me up to the counter_, she wrote politely. _It's too bad that you are gone now though. I still can't quite reach._

- - - - -

Some letters, Hinata finds, ought not to be sent anyway. This she learns when she first writes Sasuke, after years of ignoring him to the best of his ability. She does not compliment his handsome looks, nor does she give her condolences for his family. She simply writes: _Have a good New Year's_ in clean, brusque strokes of her pen. In the same day, she writes Uzumaki Naruto, meaning to hide it behind the mirror in her room. Instead, she covers up the ruse with a whole slew of letters for her fellow academy students. (_Her father tells her that this is good and will harbor feelings of loyalty for her. Hinata thinks of no such thing, only hoping that someone will be happy that she makes the effort. She does not expect much_.)

When she hands them out at the academy, she smiles shyly and acts as though she is not at all bothered by her classmates expressions. They are not familiar with the stiff formalities of the Hyuuga clan, and she does not expect them to. She would not wish the duty to write another hollow felicitation on a single soul.

Naruto, upon receiving the letter, looks at her suspiciously despite his warm winter smile. Hinata does not think that he does it to hurt so much as not to hurt himself. All the same, he thanks her with his usual excitement and grins to himself, keeping his happiness for his own.

When Hinata gives her letter to Sasuke, she knows that he is familiar with the tradition and not at all impressed. Without parents of his own, he will likely never have to send letters to friends, family, or allies. He keeps his life to himself, and wants no other to understand it. Hinata imagines that this is because he thinks this makes him singular in a group.

It seems very selfish.

"Why are you giving me this?" he asks, turning it over in his hands. At first, Hinata is confused because she knows fully well that he knows exactly why. However, a guarded look in his face brings pauses to her timid words. "You used to give these to . . . us . . . every year, but . . . stopped." Even now, Sasuke does not bring _that_ up, not even to someone who knows what happened.

Hinata, looking at her handful of brightly colored cards and kanji, does not know why she did not send Sasuke a card for the past five years. He is not his brother, he did not betray his clan, and at one point he might have looked forward to those plasticine letters.

"I am sorry," she says quietly. "I thought that you did not want normality now. I m-must have been mistaken."

- - - - -

Hinata spends all of her life sending little gold charmed cards to her cousin Neji, but he only frowns and calls her frivolous, and continues to do so for years. As a child she is offended, wishing nothing but her cousin's affections like he once gave her, long ago when her kanji was barely legible. They had both giggled as though it were secret, drawing stick figure animals and clumsy lopsided trees and flowers.

One death, her uncle's, later, Neji does not giggle anymore and he does not draw animals. He makes hand seals quicker than she does, draws his kunai out more gracefully than she does, and finally, learns his jyuuken in a more rapid succession than she does. As the heiress of the clan, it is an embarrassment. As a family member, it is hurtful in the way that stabbing your finger with a needle might be; sharp and indiscriminate of propriety.

"Do not write me any more of these. It's ridiculous as we live in the same house."

_Dear Neji,_ she writes, _I am not writing to you, but a piece of paper that might have a similar name as you. Happy New Year's. So tell me, if you do not draw animals and trees anymore, do you only draw blood?_

The brush moves in stark lines. She burns these letters over a candle flame while Hanabi coos threats of telling their father from behind her. Neji seems pleased when she only looks at him nervously at breakfast the next morning. If nothing else, burning the letters makes her feel better about her own anger against him.

One heart attack and startling revelation later, Neji still says the same thing, but accepts the letter with a nod and a vacant blink. She does not have to burn them to satisfy her desire to speak to him without actually speaking. It is enough, at least for now.

Whether he will admit it or not, Hinata now knows enough body language to know that he is pleased, in the way that his eyes soften and his jaw relaxes. Her eyes don't dart nervously with relief like they would be a few months before.

- - - - -

In the winter of her fourteenth year, Hinata finally writes to herself. She has avoided it as long as she could. It wasn't as though she couldn't write in a journal to herself, but it always seemed a little too impersonal, like talking to a wall instead of something that might consider what she has to say for a moment.

Hiashi forbade both of the girls to have journals long ago, saying that it was likely that one of them would write something that should not be put into words, like a family secret or weakness. Hinata smiles from across her father's desk, thinking that there is much worse that she could leave for people to see.

When she finally sets the crisp paper in front of her, printed with red ribbons and golden bells, she is not entirely sure what she ought to write at all. It's been such a long time since she's seriously considered herself, and she had hoped to keep it that way as long as possible. It was just that much easier to write to people that saw her as weak but obligated to pay her respects.

_Dear Hinata_, she writes sloppily (_because it doesn't matter as much when it's just herself_), _I see that you don't stutter as much as you used to, and your kanji could almost pass as neat for once. I don't expect much of a response from you via a letter, but I figure you'll get the message in January anyway._

_You seem to write these letters often, but it doesn't seem like they do much good. You don't send the ones you want to and send too many of the ones that don't mean anything. How many letters do you suppose people send that are just like that?_

Hinata does not send this one either. She ties it to the gate where people tie their New Year's fortunes in hopes of getting new ones. Besides, she's tired of grinding ink for her letters anyway, and she doesn't think that the feudal lord of a southern province will be too disconcerted if she fails to correspond just this once.

- - - - -

End.


End file.
